In just peace theory, three primary principles – truth, respect, security – stand as categories of both personal morality and public policy that can make for peace. October 21 is the UN Day of International Peace and Global Ceasefire. It is a day to rededicate ourselves to the goal of ending violent conflict in the world, both local and global. This Peace Day comes as scorching drought-dry summer turns to a cool green autumn of an exhausting US presidential campaign. Mercifully, this will be over in a few weeks.
At first, I was worried that a one-day conference wouldn’t be worth $99 or, at the last minute, $149, but the moment I was welcomed into the Unitarian church on Franklin, I received a nice string backpack containing three new books, all useful, and two, especially valuable. Already I had recouped $60! And there was much more. This is a conference I believe many Tikkun readers would appreciate. Hawken and the Seattle Protests: Writing That Changes the World
The best moment – Paul Hawken’s speech – came first.
As often happens in the evening when my husband Derrick has heard a lot of political rhetoric on the radio or TV (I’m the one really watching or listening – he’s the one trying to do Sudoku to escape it all), Derrick will make one comment that will spark my imagination and get my fingers flying on the keyboard. Last night his quip was that the “beast” conservatives were trying to starve or drown wasn’t government, it was, among many would-be victims, our god-daughter who has Down Syndrome. “Starve the Beast” has been a mantra of conservative politics for decades. The phrase is attributed to an un-named Ronald Reagan staffer and was most recently used publicly by Sarah Palin who called on Congress to “starve the beast” by cutting taxes. Grover Norquist, author of the coercive “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” rather than referring to some mythical beast, actually provides language that is closer to what Derrick suggested last night, when Norquist infamously said that “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Watching Ann Romney’s speech to the Republican National Convention was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. First she sounded like she was making an argument for a progressive agenda, and then she defended a position that completely contradicted everything she said in the first part of the speech. Why does anyone think it was a success? Mrs. Romney began her speech by invoking the concept of “love” as what “holds us all together.” She then empathetically depicted the struggles ordinary Americans face, laying in bed side-by-side trying to figure out how to pay the bills, reeling at the price of gas and groceries, working long hours so their kids can get new clothes or to pay for them to participate in sports, which “used to be free” but now are not – none of which she has actually experienced firsthand, of course.
On Sunday August 19th, 2012 in Jerusalem, four more women were arrested at the Kotel, the Western Wall, considered the holiest site in Judaism, for reportedly engaging in behavior that could lead to “endangering the public peace and for wearing a prayer shawl.” They were praying.
August 18 is the 92nd birthday of the 19th amendment to the Constitution that gave voting rights to women. American women worked for at least 72 years – from 1848 to 1920–to expand the franchise to include women. And as late at the 1960s, men and women such as Fannie Lou Hamer took beatings for the right to vote. Many religious traditions teach the importance of memory and the importance of ancestor respect. In traditional African cosmology, the ancestors remain a part of the living community.
With Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, this election has become very personal for me. In this posting, I’d like to share how the field looks from my perspective, using my 53 year-old lens, colored by my life experience and where I am in life right now. And, I think there are a lot more people like me that might want to take a glance at their choices through my lens because I am beginning to agree with the pundits, that this is one of the most important elections in a generation. I’m a 53 year-old gay man, Jewish, married for over 20 years to the same Presbyterian husband, living in a “ticky tacky house” on a hill in Daly City that’s around five years from being paid off. I started life in the housing projects in Rockaway New York, subsidized apartments built to help the working poor.
In choosing Ryan, Romney has showed that he is not afraid of Obama’s scare tactics, and of the Democrat’s ad hominem attacks on him — rich, unfeeling, out of touch, and all the rest.
When Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, announced Representative Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, Ryan said that America was an idea. He spoke of the idea that human rights derive from God and from nature and not from government. Whether or not human rights ought to be grounded in natural law is a discussion for another day. For now, let us think about the opposition Ryan asserts between God and nature on one hand and government on the other. His remarks intimate that government is some tyrannical bogey man out to debilitate righteous free enterprise, binding it with red tape and stealing our liberties and our hard-earned money through taxes.
Ekev I: Towards a Feminist Theology within Judaism
Devarim 8:9- “a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills are quarried copper”. The Avodat Yisrael points us to a reading of this verse by the Targum Yonatan, an early Aramaic translation/Midrash (parts of which are quite ancient, others as late as the seventh or eighth century) in which this verse is read as “a land whose sages proclaim decrees as forceful as steel and whose wise men ask questions as solid as copper”. He then points us to a verse from Isaiah 49:18 referring to being dressed like a bride in ornaments and jewelry, which is read by the Alshich as also referring to the arguments of the sages. The AY goes on to explain that while arguments per se might be perceived as a negative phenomenon, in the end they will all coexist as part of a more complex structure, serving as the “ornaments of the bride”. He argues that the differing positions in Talmudic disputes reflect the limited nature of the individual soul operating within its own perspective; but in the future we will see how all the different positions taken on spiritual matters will all be part of one totality, like a work of art, like ornaments of a bride, which work not as individual objects but as part of an array, of a full image.